The moderator of a Reddit forum dedicated to drones has resigned in fury after a deluge of posts from conspiracy theorists about alleged mass drone sightings in New Jersey.
In a blistering note announcing their departure from the subreddit, the moderator said the sightings were “all bullshit” and declared: “I can’t stem the tide of dumbness.”
“To address the obvious: Yes, the current idiotic discourse over nonexistant [sic] swarms of ‘drones’ in the eastern United States contributed to this choice. Seriously, if you guys were seeing all the posts I’ve been removing for the past couple weeks, you’d be sick of this place too,” he wrote in a farewell post.
His resignation comes after residents across the country began reporting unexplained drones in the sky over the past month. Some lawmakers have joined the fray to demand answers from the federal government.
The moderator, who goes by the screen name Nanosauromo and did not want to share his real name, told The Independent that watching over the subreddit had become unbearable due to hundreds of people posting videos of ordinary passenger planes or their neighbor’s drones with claims they were UFOs or government surveillance.
“We’ve always gotten those types of posts, and there’s been a rule against them for years, but there was definitely a dramatic increase in the last month or so,” he said. “If there’s something to be learned from this, it’s that people don’t look up very much, and aren’t aware of just how many lights in the sky were always there.”
Many theories have been advanced by the public to explain the sightings: some believe the drones belong to a foreign adversary, some suspect surveillance by the U.S. government, others believe aliens might be responsible, and one Congressman has gone so far as to claim that an Iranian mothership off the coast of the United States is launching drones.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN last week that many of the sightings were “a case of mistaken identity” and that Homeland Security is in regular contact with New Jersey officials and has deployed experts and monitoring equipment to the state. “We have not seen any unusual activity. We know of no threat. We know of no nefarious activity,” he said.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement: “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
That hasn’t stopped people from flooding the r/drones subreddit with videos of alleged sightings.
In a lengthy resignation message titled “Actually, you know what, screw it. I’m out”, the moderator continued:
“I’ll say basically my final piece on the situation here: It’s all bullshit. One or two instances of someone seeing their neighbor’s drone gets reported on by boring local news, which leads more people to be on the lookout for “drones”; these people report their own cases of seeing “drones” that are really videos of ordinary airplanes, helicopters, or stars or planets in the sky (I’ve seen countless such pictures and videos and yes, this describes all of them), which leads to more media coverage, which conditions people to think everything they see in the night sky is a “drone”, taking more videos of manned aircraft and celestial bodies, and the whole thing keeps snowballing until we have the former governor of Maryland claiming he’s being spied on by the fucking constellation Orion.”
Nanosauromo was the sole moderator of the subreddit, which had over 230,000 members when he resigned. His role has now been filled by six new moderators.
He told The Independent that he started as a moderator on the subreddit in 2020. He had a job filming weddings as a drone videographer a few years earlier and he enjoyed it so much that he bought his own drone and kept flying as a hobby.
When the posts about sightings started getting out of hand, he took measures to lock down the posts, but that only made it worse.
“There were a lot of conspiracy nuts telling me stuff like ‘you can’t hide the truth’ and calling me an asshole. If anything, the amount of crap I had to deal with went up,” he said.
The purpose of the subreddit is labeled as: “Discussion of drones - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and the flying thereof.” Most of the posts are technical discussions about hobby drones, images and videos taken by drones and general questions about flying drones.
In an indication that the subreddit is prone to conspiracy theories, one of the forum’s rules, dubbed Rule 51, states: “You are not being stalked by a DJI Phantom.”
“This is a blanket rule to cover posts by people who think some person or government is spying on them or every tiny light in the sky is a drone. We don’t want nonsensical conspiracy talk here,” the rule states.
“You are probably not interesting enough to be worth spying on. That thing in the sky is probably an airplane. And if a consumer drone was close enough to look in your window, it would be deafening,” it continues.
“Calm down, and take your vague conspiracy malarkey elsewhere.”
